Just now the sun came out and it was the first time baby moved inside me all day. I was watering my plants as the last of the snow melts outside my side door. The windows needed this cleansing. I moved closer to the pane, wondering when the robin will return to where she’s nested above my side door these last four years.
Looking through the glass sparked a flashback to that second night I stayed with you last December. Remember the size of the snowflakes? Like golfballs drifting down. I’d had a bath in the early evening and was lying with my feet up on your sofa, my iPod echoing in the semi-darkness, when you returned to the apartment. The first thing you did was cross the room to open the blinds. You called me over to the window then and we stood looking up to the sky and onto the street, following their descent amidst the traffic. Your hands were deep in your pockets and my heart was high in my throat. They were so goddamn breathtaking and, recalling another wintry night far in the past, I fought a sudden rise of tears, my eyelashes blinking them back.
The snowflakes looked solid, they were that big. Their size made them appear heavy, less fragile somehow yet impossibly floating with their weight, so quietly and softly. It was like we were standing in this gigantic snowglobe: a souvenir from Vancouver. And that’s just how my heart felt. As though it had been inverted (like a silver claddagh), turned upside down and shaken into a million ice crystals dancing all around us. For sure it was falling as gently, silently, steadily as those flakes; the tiny hairs on my neck rising, anticipatory, timorously reaching out to the close proximity of your t-shirt, the skin of your arms, as I stood nervous and speechless, my mouth a little dry.
Did you know that snowflakes aren’t even white? They’re clear. Just the light, the way it hits ‘em, gets diffused by the hollows within the crystal. People talk about how perfect a snowflake is but actually its flaws cause the light to shine white and sparkle like a diamond. Its incalculable, tiny, crystalline imperfections enhance its beauty. The things I imagine doing with you, to you, are as innumerable and varied.
And it's this reverie that causes my fingers to ache with the memory of the silken smoothness of your back as they slide down the cold glass of my door, still a touch of this past winter clinging there. Hiccups begin in my pelvis. It's not a euphemism. But it feels like a little heartbeat down there, reverberating with the rhythm of your own fingers' caresses. I look at my hands. How many weeks before they draw this little one to my breast now, the pulse of the umbilical cord slowing before it's cut: less than I can count on these fingers against the pane, guaranteed. Seven weeks? Five? Eight, maybe? I remember how baby kicked when you warmed my feet with yours under the sheets that night. You don’t have to talk to me about water and longing. ‘Cause lately I feel like crystallized H2O, like one of those snowflakes we witnessed the second-last day of December: floating around in space, not knowing exactly where I’ll land with the delicacy of all my womb carries, the frailty of my heart. I feel a little afraid of the heat of your breath fogging the window, emanating from your skin as I drift down through the sky. The stars, where I began this journey, seem so far away up above...
I wish to gather the courage to say just how I feel:
‘Cause I really don’t want to disappear. I don’t want to melt away.
Unless it’s on your bottom lip. Your tongue.
What I want is for you to come outside onto the street and open your mouth along with your heart. Open wide, ‘kay? And catch me.
Catch the one-of-a-kind, hexagonal symmetry of this love and swallow its perfection, its imperfections whole, so its light can diffuse, dispel the dark places and shine again from within…
Music: Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol;
I Remember (December), Lisa Hannigan and Damien Rice
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